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Minister of human resource development MM Pallam Raju on Tuesday said India has the “potential to become a worldwide hub” for sourcing skilled manpower and earn from the demographic dividend.

Raju said the greatest challenge is to make the large workforce more employable. “Out of around 4 lakh engineering students passing out every year only about 20 per cent are employable. Developing skills is as important as training. A larger effort is needed to create a skilled workforce with employment potential,” he said at the CII HR Summit here.

“Recognising that the future growth of India will depend on greater skill development, the National Policy for Skill Development aims to create a skilled workforce of 500 million by 2022. The 12th Plan has put a modest target of skilling 80 million by 2017,” he said, calling for greater industry participation in addressing the challenge of skill development.

Addressing the summit, The Indian Express Editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta said, “The country is producing architects and engineers, but we’re not producing enough thought leaders. We are simply not developing enough skilled manpower to manage the economy as it unfolds.”

Gupta said that India created a skewed skill-set nation, with too few avenues for those not opting for medicine or engineering. “Even our RBI Governor hails from IIT. This country doesn’t have enough economists, or political scientists or sociologists,” he said.

ICICI MD & CEO Chanda Kochhar said, “Every sector of India’s economy would have to perform if the country was to create 12 million jobs every year to absorb the rising numbers entering the workforce every year.”